Tech and vendor recs
Platforms I recommend for your marketing efforts:
This course, and the Arrowhawk Records website, are both Squarespace sites. I try to direct record label customers to our Squarespace web store as much as possible, since the Commerce Basic plan takes 0% fees on physical goods, vs. the roughly 10% taken out of every sale on platforms like Bandcamp. Platforms like Bandcamp however are good for cross-promotion and discovery, so I recommend selling on both. We’ll discuss all of this in a future workshop!
Mailchimp or Email Octopus:
While I recommend Mailchimp for more complex email marketing, Email Octopus is a good budget-friendly option. It’s good to be able to segment your mailing lists by tags like top fans, or tour market.
My entire life runs on ToDoist, from daily to-do lists, to album rollouts, to packing list templates I use for ever trip. A lot of productivity platforms feel like big time sucks, but this one is just simple and clicks for me.
Accounts are free, w/ 2x the storage of Dropbox free plans. Full disclosure: I work here! And, I use Highnote to organize all the audio needed for a record label project, like demos, instrumentals, and vinyl masters. It’s my favorite way to organize and communicate around audio projects, and they also have features like seamless version comparison, polls, timestamped commenting, and more for audio creators.
Just because you can DIY it doesn’t mean you have to. Marketing tasks like Instagram + Facebook ads, Mailchimp integration, website + merch store setup, and even data entry can be delegated to freelancers. Have someone else enter all those emails from the merch table clipboard into your Mailchimp account, so you can focus on the things only you can do, like songwriting or creating content.
They cost more than traditional mailers, but over the years we’ve found them to be worth every penny in reducing returns and damages.
All these platforms begin to stack up. Please lock your shit down. Do not recycle passwords on multiple platforms. Always use 2-factor authentication. I’ve seen artists build up social media followings, just to get hacked and have to start a new account (Meta “support” seems to be pretty nonexistent when that happens.) I don’t care which one you use, but I encourage you to use some kind of password manager.
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While I use StickerMule for our roll labels for UPCs and marketing copy on retail copies of albums, I also end up making a lot of merch based on their weekly specials, like keychains or bumper stickers. We also use their printed packing tape with our label branding.
Vendors + Service Provider contact list:
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(I don’t publicly publish email addresses because I don’t want my network to be spammed by bots!)